NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (NV35) Review. Page 5

We reviewed the new graphics solution from NVIDIA aka NV35. This long awaited product boasts a lot of really strong features and comes to replace a not very successful NV30. Now the indisputable leadership in the graphics industry solely belongs to NVIDIA. Find out more about the newcomer in our review!

Drivers

When installing the card you should connect additional power supply, otherwise the card working frequencies will drop down to 250MHz/500MHz and the “card protection system” implemented via NVIDIA System Sentinel utility will bring up the following window:

When we just started testing the card the newest driver version available was NVIDIA Detonator 43.80. Just like all previous driver versions, this driver also located all graphics card settings in Desktop Properties window. Most pages with these settings look quite ordinarily, however, a few of them are worth dwelling on here.

First of all, I would like to draw your attention to 3D settings:

Here you can choose between the quality and performance when using anisotropic filtering (you have Performance, Balanced and Quality modes, the latter offered by default). You can also enable full-screen anti-aliasing (2x, Quincunx, 4x, 4xS for Direct3D, 6xS for Direct3D and 8x). Besides, you can force anisotropic filtering (2x, 4x and 8x modes).

If you change the Coolbits key in the registry with the help of Rivatuner utility, you will get the page where the graphics chip and memory frequencies for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra can be adjusted. Just like by NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, the new card has different nominal frequencies in different working modes: in 2D they are 300MHz for the chip and 850MHz for the memory...

In 3D they are 450MHz and 850MHz respectively:

Finally, here is an absolutely new page: Hardware Monitoring. This panel shows graphics core and memory temperatures taken from the hardware monitoring diodes. You can set the maximum allowed core temperature here. On reaching this maximum temperature, the core frequency will be automatically reduced: